Okra Soup - Sierra Leonean Recipe

You know it's a good Saturday, when you wake up to the neighbors singing all things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small.  This is them telling you indirectly that they will be cooking a nice dish on that day with lots of meat. One such dish is okra soup.

This soup is a Saturday favourite in Sierra Leone and is normally served with fufu or steamed rice.  Fufu is made from grated fermented cassava, which is cooked into a dough.  I will be serving this with semolina as fufu is hard to find in Australia.  

So come on, give this recipe a go and let me know how yours turned out.

The ingredients I used are:

1kg okra (chopped), 2 pigs trotters (cut into pieces and boiled with salt for 15 mins) 500gms tripe(boiled for 20 mins) 250gms blue crab, ogiri (fermented sesame seeds) 5 maggi stock cubes, 1 brown onion and 2 habanero chillies (crushed) 550gms palmoil, smoked fish (washed and broken into pieces), 2 cups water. 

 Method

Put the water, tripe, trotters, crushed onion and chillies, ogiri and maggi cubes in a pot, bring to a boil over high heat and cook for 10 minutes.

Add smoked fish and palmoil and cook for 15 minutes

Add okra, cook for another 10 minutes

finally add crab and cook for 15 minutes, or till the soup thickens

Serve it with cooked semolina. Delicious

PS: Most of the ingredients I used can be purchased from African and Asian grocery stores.